Hey WTF profs, is it this bad?
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How did they get out of high school, let alone pass entrance exams?
It’s leaving colleges no choice but to lower their expectations.
Isn't that backwards? It seems to me the answer is sending the students back to remedial work before they proceed. I don't understand this lowering of standards.
I read a lot of comments on YT from my subscriptions. I am amazed sometimes at the complete lack of punctuation (not even any periods!), just run-on, barely comprehensible stream of consciousness.
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I'm also wondering about the younger kids in primary and middle school. Maybe @dolmansaxlil can weigh in with that perspective.
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I've been away from teaching for a year. I was teaching writing, so I didn't test for reading comprehension. I thought I gave them a reasonable amount of reading to do, considering the time required for the significant volume of writing that I and my colleagues assigned. We all felt it was important for them to read, too, because writers have to read. How else will you know if your ideas are original? And, of course, people who don't are at a huge disadvantage when it comes to the mechanics of writing. I never did figure out why people who didn't like to read even wanted to write.
I'd say that a significant portion of them were able to read the assignments just fine, and they included sophisticated texts--Hamlet, the Brontës, Frankenstein. Some of them surely skipped the reading and sat out the class discussions as best they could. I'm pretty sure I could tell who they were.
Toward the end, I observed some things that I thought were shocking. I had a graduate student tried to use AI to outline his novel, and the result didn't even resemble the assignment I'd given.
I also noticed that a number of students didn't seem to grasp how a novel is laid out on the page, because they were clueless about what I meant by "scene breaks" until I projected a published page on the screen and showed them the white space that breaks a fictional narrative when there's a change in POV character, time, or place. I finally realized it was because they were listening to audiobooks. I had to change my syllabus to specify that, although audiobooks are a completely legitimate way to consume text for other purposes, they needed to read printed books (paper or ebook were both fine) for my class. And, of course, I explained the reason for this change.
In short, written word is competing with a lot of other kinds of media these days. (Movies, TV, games, the internet--all the usual suspects.) Games, in particular, are a huge part of young people's lives these days. I privately thought that many of my students really wanted to write video games, but that wasn't what our program taught.
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I don't see it to the extent that "students can't read." But I also rarely teach lower level classes, and the one 200-level class I teach is specialized enough that it usually enrolls students with a specific interest in the subject matter. I think in upper level classes, a lot of weeding out has happened and also when teaching majors, there's a different level of engagement from the students.
And most of my grad students received their BAs in Japan, so totally different kind of preparation.
So on the one hand, I don't experience this to the degree that other faculty do.
On the other hand, I can tell that students increasingly seem less academically prepared than in pre-pandemic, and I do feel that the negative influence of AI is starting to creep in.
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Just an aside on games, which Mary Anna brought up. The musical backdrop of games is itself becoming a musical genre of its own, with recognized composers, some of whom have gained reputations as serious composers. This is something I haven’t investigated, but it sure surprised me.
It sort of echoes what happened in the previous generation with film composers like Ennio Morricone and Bernard Herrmann and Ryuji Sakamoto, who now see big orchestra concerts devoted to their film music.
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Just an aside on games, which Mary Anna brought up. The musical backdrop of games is itself becoming a musical genre of its own, with recognized composers, some of whom have gained reputations as serious composers. This is something I haven’t investigated, but it sure surprised me.
It sort of echoes what happened in the previous generation with film composers like Ennio Morricone and Bernard Herrmann and Ryuji Sakamoto, who now see big orchestra concerts devoted to their film music.
Just an aside on games, which Mary Anna brought up. The musical backdrop of games is itself becoming a musical genre of its own, with recognized composers, some of whom have gained reputations as serious composers.
Absolutely. And Japanese game music in particular tends to be very piano-centric, with Nobuo Uematsu probably being the most famous. He did the music for the Final Fantasy games. I have never played any of those games, which is probably for the best because then I would have wanted to play his music, and everything I’ve looked at is all very hard!
(Although now that I say that, I should look again and see how difficult it looks to me now.)It sort of echoes what happened in the previous generation with film composers like Ennio Morricone and Bernard Herrmann and Ryuji Sakamoto, who now see big orchestra concerts devoted to their film music.
Yes, I think this is a good comparison. We recently had a big discussion at the Piano Tell forum about whether to group film music, anime music, and “post classical” piano together or not.
It’s difficult because some composers (like Joe Hisaishi) compose for film, anime, and also do compositions that are just stand-alones as well. And there are people like Ryuichi Sakamoto who compose for film but not anime or games, and also do a lot of non-film compositions.
And the other issue is stylistic similarity, and because of that, I personally think it makes sense to have a “parent genre” (like “post-classical”) within that, sub-genres like film music, anime music, game music, and maybe solo piano. But not everyone agrees with me.
Sorry for the thread drift!!
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Bringing it back to the original topic, there are probably a lot of parallels here between reading and music, because people have said that younger generations don’t listen to “album-length” music any more, in favor of picking and listening to only specific (individual) songs. And the way popular music is being written reflects listening tendencies as well, with intros being shorter and the music quickly getting to the hook. To say nothing of the fact that are fewer and fewer classical music listeners as well.
The common thread is a lack of attention span, whether it’s a book-length work of fiction or an extended work of music.
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I was talking to a book group last week about short stories. Our book for the meeting had been a short story collection, and everybody was saying that, though they enjoyed them, they hardly ever read short stories.
I might have thought that short stories would have made a comeback by now, due to shortened attention spans. A hundred years ago, when they were a huge part of reading culture, it was because of the popularity of magazines. There were many outlets at that time for pulp, serious, and middlebrow fiction, and many writers depended more for their income on sales to magazines than on book sales. For them to become popular again, I think there would need to be a move toward distributing them as single stories through subscriptions like Spotify and Audible, rather than in print. (They're available in those formats, but they don't sell a lot and the royalties are abysmal. Few well-known authors write for publication in that format and few people read them.)
I don't think I'm wrong about the shortened attention spans changing the market, though, because flash fiction (less than 1000 words) has exploded in popularity during the smartphone era. It's easy to read something that length on a phone. One of the early outlets for flash pieces is called Smokelong Quarterly, because you can smoke a cigarette while you read one...they're one smoke long. Again, the problem is that flash fiction outlets usually don't pay, so they don't attract writers who attract readers.
That's a long bit of thread drift, but so it goes...
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Bringing it back to the original topic, there are probably a lot of parallels here between reading and music, because people have said that younger generations don’t listen to “album-length” music any more, in favor of picking and listening to only specific (individual) songs. And the way popular music is being written reflects listening tendencies as well, with intros being shorter and the music quickly getting to the hook. To say nothing of the fact that are fewer and fewer classical music listeners as well.
The common thread is a lack of attention span, whether it’s a book-length work of fiction or an extended work of music.
@ShiroKuro This is interesting.
Before the advent of long-playing LPs, people with record players could only listen to three to five minutes of music at a time. Each record typically had two songs on it, one on each side. In the 60s, 45 rpms were pretty popular, ditto situation. So perhaps listening to "album-length" music is an anomaly?
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@ShiroKuro This is interesting.
Before the advent of long-playing LPs, people with record players could only listen to three to five minutes of music at a time. Each record typically had two songs on it, one on each side. In the 60s, 45 rpms were pretty popular, ditto situation. So perhaps listening to "album-length" music is an anomaly?
perhaps listening to "album-length" music is an anomaly?
All good points, very interesting to think about! What about the fact that people would go to live orchestral concerts? (with no video presentation in the background!)
Somehow, I still suspect people had longer attention spans for music than they do now... but maybe that's just my bias!
@mary-anna that was all super interesting, thank you! I wonder how it is in Japan, where literacy and reading measures (like newspaper subscriptions, book sales etc) have been consistently higher than in the US. And publishing traditions are different (e.g., short story collections and essay books).... otoh, cell phone reading is also huge so....
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Re: the album vs. single question, only for reading fiction
I'm not sure there has ever been a hugely popular reading analog to the album. Anthologies of short stories by a number of authors have always been, and they still are, published, but not as a significant portion of the market. Collections by a single author have been, and are still, published, although this generally true only for authors who are very popular in novel form, and their short story collections do not sell anything close to the volume that their novels do.
I think the pulp era may have been the only times that short stories were a significant portion of many authors' incomes. Come to think of it, people like Dickens, Louisa May Alcott, and Poe published frequently in magazines, so that probably extends back to the 1800s and ends around the time of WWII. Even then, I feel sure that it was only due to the popularity of magazines.
Even Agatha Christie, the bestselling novelist of all time, received the bulk of her income in her early years from short stories and serializations of her novels in the pulps. They paid very well. Actually, magazine rates aren't a lot different now than they were then, which means their real value is a small fraction of what it was a century ago.
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